LLVM Still Looking At Relicensing, Encouraging More Women & Code of Conduct

Beyond the talk about new C++ features, OpenCL 2.0 plans for Clang 3.9, LLVM's new ELF linker, and other interesting talks from last month's EuroLLVM conference in Barcelona, there was also a session about the LLVM Foundation.

The LLVM Foundation just turned two years old to better separate itself from Apple, Google, and other companies by being an independent 501(c)3 non-profit organization to promote LLVM. The LLVM Foundation site continues to be very bare, so at least the foundation's BoF session offers a glimpse at the current happenings via the published meeting minutes.

First up, they are still looking at relicensing LLVM under the Apache 2.0 license. This LLVM relicensing topic was brought up a few months ago for something different to the current University of Illinois . NCSA open-source license that's similar to a three-clause BSD permissive license.

The BoF minutes indicate the code re-licensing is still being worked out. It looks like it's still a long road ahead though before LLVM would be able to change its license due to all the legal blockades and also needing to get all past/present contributors to approve.

The meeting minutes also mention they are looking at ways to get "women in compilers" like a mentor network of women, support for having women at LLVM-related conferences, and getting more compiler attention for related conferences that are attracting women. They also want to run "bias busting" sessions, work from the angle of getting women interested in math to working on compilers, and looking at other organization's models for attracting women like what is being done by the Python Foundation.

LLVM is also still working on a Code of Conduct but they ran out of time at EuroLLVM to discuss the matter further. The code of conduct has been an open matter on the mailing list for the past few months.